Case study: WordPress clean-up & SEO consultancy

The brief

Apex came to us complaining that, following a redesign executed by another agency, they were struggling to get Google to rank their website. They weren’t chasing page one in this instance, simply trying to rank at all.

With less than 10% of their content ranking, and numerous 404s and redirect loops, Apex tasked Ultimately Better with “making Google love us again”.

What we did

To ensure we knew the scale of the task that we were looking at, we first performed a basic audit on the existing Apex website. The problems we discovered were numerous:

• Broken internal link structure, with no obvious way to traverse between site sections
• Limited content on key landing pages, and old well-ranked pages removed completely
• Huge media assets hard-coded into a poorly developed WordPress theme causing performance issues, particularly on slow connections and mobile devices
• Yoast SEO improperly configured, causing potential locality issues
• Unnecessary custom block development heavily reliant on superfluous additional styling/JavaScript assets

Rather than trying to sticky tape a bad build, Ultimately Better recommended a complete rebuild and were given the go ahead. We:

• rebuilt the site with a bespoke WordPress theme, built from the ground up to match the existing design, utilising Gutenberg and native blocks to reduce the reliance on third party scripts and services
• stripped out unnecessary assets to improve performance and Core Web Vitals scores
• reinstated some content that had been removed, integrating key landing pages into the site’s new design templates
• improved the consistency and placement of call to action panels throughout site using synced block patterns
• improved the internal link structure with return to section links, breadcrumbs, and a clear site heirarchy
• reconfigured Yoast SEO and WordPress to remove issues that might impact geographical ranking
• removed broken links, set up new contextual links to relevant pages, added redirects for content no longer there/relevant
• configured relevant meta data for the new landing pages as appropriate
• advised on future content strategy and SEO

Challenges

One of the biggest problems with the Apex site was the scale of the botched iterations of the site from over the years with multiple sets of site structure and no coherent URL scheme. Blog posts had been moved to and fro under the sitemap and many – despite being good content earning relevant backlinks – had been removed altogether. We minimised our work on URLs to prevent adding another iteration on top, aiming instead to fix broken links and create a suite of redirects and proper canonicals to shore up traffic to the right places.

With the site structure decided, the next biggest challenge was pulling relevant content that had been badly hard-coded into theme files out and making it content manageable. We believe that if you’re going to use a content management system, you might as well actually use it – hard-coding content into themes defeats the point!

With the hard-coded content issue resolved, the final step before rebuilding the content in the Gutenberg editor was recreating existing bespoke functionality such as the exhibition stand galleries. We de-duplicated the code to remove repeated instances of the same thing, fixed a couple of potential security issues and polished it off by minifying assets so that everything loads as quickly as possible.

Deliverables

• Fully bespoke WordPress theme developed based on the client’s existing site, with performance and search engine optimisation in mind
• Site setup tailored to client’s own hosting provider, working around restrictions caused by nginx (e.g. non-htaccess based redirects)
• Post-live redirects created and internal links updated to minimise rebuild risk on what little search engine ranking Apex held
• Extensive improvements across the site, reduction of code overhead with complete refactoring and limited dependence on bloated third party plugins
• Bespoke, tailored performance optimisations to remaining plugins and integrations to improve Core Web Vital scores and user experience
• Integration with Google Tag Manager, Search Console, and Facebook pixel as standard
• Extensive content strategy and technical SEO advice to allow the client to continuously improve